George Zimmerman calls himself a Democrat. A local media channel even reported this back in March 2012.

“What we do know about Zimmerman is… he calls himself a Democrat.”

George Zimmerman was an Obama Democrat. He took a black girl to prom. He tutured black kids. The Examiner reported:

Al Sharpton has incited crowds with “arrest Zimmerman now!” and MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough has flatly called George Zimmerman a murderer. Yet what has been widely underreported by the majority of American news organs is that Zimmerman is actually an Obama Democrat who has quite the history of working with and for fellow Americans of African heritage, as reported byThe Telegraph (of London, England) on 15 July, 2013; both the Mercury News (of Silicon Valley, CA) and The National Reviewon July 14, 2013; and Breitbart.com on Feb. 6, 2013.

At times collectively and others singularly, The Telegraph, the Mercury News and The National Review have all cited past instances of Zimmerman’s liberal/Democrat street-cred that would cause any Hollywood starlet or six figure income resident of Manhattan’s tony Upper West Side hang their head in shame.

Researchable and legitimate source examples of Zimmerman’s past history of working with and for blacks include: •“He and a black friend opened up an insurance office in a Florida…” •“He’d engaged in notably un-racist behaviour such as taking a black girl to his high-school prom…” •“Not only does he have black relatives, he has reportedly donated his time to tutor black children.” •“He launched a campaign to help a homeless black man who was beaten up by a white kid.”

Fox News continues to be near the top in cable television in terms of the number of viewers it attracts, but it is near the top in another category, too: the median age of its audience is among the oldest in television.

Megyn Kelly and Elisabeth Hasselbeck are both far younger than Bill O’Reilly.

For most of the television business — the segment that relies on advertising — that would be serious cause for concern because ad sales are almost always based on a target age of 25 to 54, and Fox News, for the last two years, has had a median age of 65-plus in its ratings both for the full day and for prime time.

But up until now at least, Fox News has been more able than any other television entity to defy the tyranny of the demos, as they are known in the business. And the network, which has upturned traditions and expectations throughout its history, has earned consistently enormous profits, relying on the commitment and loyalty of its audience.

“I don’t think you can fully capture the value Fox News brings by looking at the Nielsen ratings alone,” said Craig Moffett, the longtime financial analyst who specializes in cable. Mr. Moffett, who heads his own firm, said that the key to Fox News’s continued financial strength has been “the level of passion and engagement” it inspires in its viewers.

That translates into big money because cable systems now pay Fox News one of the highest per-subscriber fees in television, 94 cents a month, topped in cable television only by a few networks, most of which have expensive sports rights to pay. (By comparison, CNN gets 57 cents a subscriber, according to SNL Kagan Research.) As Mr. Moffett put it, “There are a handful of networks consumers are deeply passionate about out of all proportion to Nielsen ratings, and distributors know if you don’t have those networks, then woe be to you.”

With close to 100 million subscribers in total, Fox News will take in $1.11 billion this year from subscription fees before it ever sells a single commercial, Kagan estimated. Still, the network faces some significant questions as it goes forward: How old is too old? And when does the issue have to be addressed?

Fox News declined to make executives available for comment, but several recent signs — including changing personalities for some of its weekday programs — suggest the network may have decided the time has come to confront the issue of age.

Just how old is its audience? It is impossible to be precise because Nielsen stops giving an exact figure for median age once it passes 65. But for six of the last eight years, Fox News has had a median age of 65-plus and the number of viewers in the 25-54 year old group has been falling consistently, down five years in a row in prime time, from an average of 557,000 viewers five years ago to 379,000 this year. That has occurred even though Fox’s overall audience in prime time is up this year, to 2.02 million from 1.89 million three years ago.

The network also has been faced with a recent string of nightly wins in that 25-54 audience by CNN, which had been hopelessly behind in recent years.

“The numbers indicate they haven’t been replacing the younger viewers,” Mr. Moffett said of Fox News. Many of the loyal viewers the network has always had are simply aging up beyond the 54-year cutoff for many ad buyers. The result is an audience edging consistently above that 65-plus number.

News audiences always trend old, and the viewers of Fox’s competitors are hardly in the full flower of youth. MSNBC’s median age for its prime-time shows this year is 60.6; CNN’s is 59.8.

In terms of the rest of television, Fox News also is quite a bit older than networks considered to have a base of older viewers. CBS has frequently been needled for having older viewers, but at 56.8, its median viewer is far younger than Fox News’s. (Viewers at Fox News’s sister network, Fox Broadcasting, have a median age of 50.2; at ABC, the median is 54.4; at NBC, it’s 47.7.)

======================================

age 2 of 2)

In cable, the ages range from as young as 28.9 for Comedy Central, to 39.2 for another Fox sister network, FX, 43.6 for ESPN, and 52.9 for USA. The only other networks to hit 65-plus are the game show network GSN and the rural news network RFD.

The downward trend in younger viewers seems to be accelerating at Fox News. In the second quarter of this year, the network scored its lowest ratings since 2001 in the 25-54 category. And through the end of last week, CNN had squeaked ahead of Fox News for Monday through Sunday prime-time numbers in the month of July — in that age group only, though.

Fox continued to have more than twice as many total viewers in most cases, but, driven by its heavy concentration on the Trayvon Martin case, CNN has posted big gains for the month in the advertiser-preferred group. Last Thursday, for example, on the strength of an interview with Mr. Martin’s parents, as well as a special documentary on the impending royal birth, CNN averaged 381,000 viewers in that 25-54 group to 333,000 for Fox News — despite having more than 1.3 million fewer overall viewers.

Is this a trend? CNN has had bursts of ratings glory before, based on breaking news stories, only to fall back again to noncompetitive status. This time, the CNN run has been more sustained, though even a quarter of a year is far from a distinct trend.

Still, there may be some sales implications for Fox. “You do see definitely accelerating negative trends at Fox News,” said James Boyle, the managing director of SQAD, an advertising tracking and forecasting firm.

Mr. Boyle said his research indicated that the first and second quarters of this year showed declines for Fox News in sales for the ad clients he studies. “The demos have impact over time,” he said.

Tracey Riener, the senior vice president of Havas Media, which buys ad space in news programs on behalf of clients like Fidelity Investments and Choice Hotels, said, “It’s hard to ignore Fox’s ratings,” noting how the network often has double or triple the number of viewers that MSNBC and CNN have.

But she added, “Median age is important For some clients, getting old is a concern. But for some clients looking for people close to retirement age or living in retirement, I would say the group 35 to 60 is still important.”

Recent moves may be the best indicator of how Fox News is responding to the audience trends. The network announced early this month that one of its rising stars, Megyn Kelly, will be moving into its prime-time lineup later this summer; and it hired Elisabeth Hasselbeck to join its top-rated cable morning show “Fox and Friends.” Both women are considerably younger than the network’s continuing hosts.

Mr. Moffett said the most successful brands always had to be aware of reinventing themselves for the next generation. He cited the example of Cadillac.

“It was amazing,” Mr. Moffett said. “You could see the average Cadillac buyer was getting one year older every year. It didn’t take a lot of math skills to realize if nothing changed, one day the last Cadillac buyer was going to walk into the showroom and then drop dead on the way out.”

Regardless of how the Bob Filner mess eventually ends—and it will end, somehow—there are questions that need to be asked and answered.

They are questions that should have been asked long ago, and should have been asked by those whose job it is to ask such questions: us.

Who are “us”?

“Us” are the San Diego news media reporters, editors, producers and writers who pretty much knew who and what Bob Filner is and has been.

Yes, I’m including myself in that group. I’ve covered Bob Filner off and on since he was elected to the San Diego Unified School District Board in 1979. From the beginning, most of us saw how arrogant Filner was and is, how abusive he could be to his own staff members, how he felt elective office entitled him to be all those things and more.

We all saw that in Filner, and yet we did nothing about it. Filner was often a topic of conversation among us when we gathered at news conferences or when we would gather at the various watering holes many of us frequented together when off work.

The near universal opinion among us was, “Can you believe this guy? Why does he get away with acting like that?” Then another round of drinks would appear, and talk went on to other things.

But we never asked those questions on air or in print. We never really tried to find out what was behind the near-incessant rumors that always floated around Filner. We never tried to confirm any of those rumors, or, if we did, we quickly gave up when presented with the denials, or refusals to talk about it.

We didn’t do our jobs. We didn’t try to work our way to the truth or what appeared to be the truth.

We didn’t uphold the tenets of our profession—to find the truth, whatever it may be, and present it to you for your information and judgment.

Why didn’t we? Probably several reasons, although they are reasons that shouldn’t have been good enough to stop us.

Was it because Filner had established himself as a Democratic power here—for a long time, the only Democratic power here?

Was it because he had built his electoral power base generally south of Interstate 8, among the “minority” communities of African-Americans, Latinos and Filipinos?

Was it because Filner totally controlled the votes and campaign funds of large and ever-growing organized labor groups, the unions?

Was it because economic pressure was brought to bear on TV station ownerships or newspaper ownerships, all of whom depend on advertising dollars as their prime source of revenue?

Was it because we were just lazy?

I honestly don’t know, but there may have elements of all of the above involved.

All I know for sure is that we had the chance—many chances over the years—to dig into the Filner story and find much of this out.

We didn’t do it, and it now appears that’s all coming home to roost.

We watch ever more highly credible women coming forward to tell their stories of encounters with Filner, and we should all be thinking, “I should have done that story. I should have asked, or demanded, the support to go after that story.”

We can, I suppose, take some hollow comfort in watching all the TV stations and newspapers covering this story like a blanket with basically unending, round-the-clock coverage.

But I can’t help but wonder, “Could we have stopped this in its tracks, years ago? Could we have pursued the story back then? Could he have gotten that story—gotten victims to talk back then?”

Who knows? The point is, we didn’t try, or try hard enough.

Those of us in the business at that time, knowing what we did, should be a little ashamed of that.

"I just became the first person in the history of newspapers to be fired for writing a paper's most-read article." --------------- Free Press editor Drew Johnson has been terminated after placing a headline on an editorial outside of normal editing procedures.

Soon after his dismissal, Mr. Johnson sent out this tweet, "I just became the first person in the history of newspapers to be fired for writing a paper's most-read article." . . .

He also wrote, "The policy I 'broke' did not exist when I 'broke' it. It was created after people complained about the headline & was applied retroactively. Any time the paper wanted to change the headline online (which is how most people read the editorial), they could've.

In his blockbuster new book, The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler, Ben Urwand documents how the film industry went out of its way in the lead-up to World War II to help Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. Scripts dealing with the German military, including All Quiet on the Western Front, were run by the German government for approval. Full scenes dealing with German treatment of Jews were cut from several movies. Entire projects were quashed because of actual or presumed Nazi disapproval.

After All Quiet on the Western Front, “every studio started making deep concessions to the German government, and when Hitler came to power in January 1933, they dealt with his representatives directly,” Urwand writes. The German government utilized what it called “Article 15,” which allowed the government to ban a company’s entire slate of films if even one of the films was considered anti-German.

In 1933, the German government went even further: they threatened to ban all American films in the country if Herman Mankiewicz and Sam Jaffe went ahead with an anti-Nazi film called The Mad Dog of Europe. The Hays Office, which ran the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association of America, tried to shut down the film. The picture eventually ended up being killed thanks to objections from Hollywood funders. “The episode,” writes Urwand, “turned out to be the most important moment in all of Hollywood’s dealings with Nazi Germany. It occurred in the first year of Hitler’s rise to power, and it defined the limits of American movies for the remainder of the decade.”

Nothing has changed.

Since September 11, 2001, the film and television industry has consistently refused to portray Islamists as enemies of the United States. As early as 2002, Hollywood was already cutting Islamic villains from mainstream films – The Sum of All Fears, based on the Tom Clancy book in which Palestinian terrorists gain access to a nuclear device, was altered so that the villains were now, ironically enough, neo-Nazis. That’s not atypical.

Even when Hollywood attempts to portray Islamist villains, it has to apologize for it. In 2005, Fox backed off the Islamic villains in its hit series 24 after pressure from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and forced star Kiefer Sutherland to read CAIR-approved text: “Now while terrorism is obviously one of the most critical challenges facing our nation and the world, it is important to recognize that the American Muslim community stands firmly beside their fellow Americans in denouncing and resisting all forms of terrorism. So in watching 24, please, bear that in mind.”

Americans are typically portrayed as the moral equivalents of jihadists in film. In The Kingdom (2007), Muslim terrorists bomb a US military installation; the end of the film features the Muslim terrorists and US trackers mirroring each other in their xenophobic rhetoric, pledging to “kill them all.” Rendition (2007) portrayed American anti-terror techniques as the cause of terrorism across the globe. The Green Zone (2010) suggested that Americans invaded Iraq for oil.

As in the 1930s, the question for Hollywood isn’t merely principle, but money. Middle Eastern money now funds a solid share of filmmaking around the globe. Alnoor Holdings, based in Doha, began a $200 million film fund in 2010; Imagenation Abu Dhabi launched a $1 billion film fund in 2008. And regional potentates have invested a fortune in oil money in various US media entities.

The same holds true with China, which is the fastest-growing movie market on the planet. The communist regime pours hundreds of millions of dollars into filmmaking, and just as the Nazis did during the 1930s, pledges to cut off distribution for any films that are considered too anti-Chinese. That’s how the army which invades America in the remake of Red Dawn which was initially Chinese became North Korean after a re-do.

In some ways, Hollywood’s self-censorship today is significantly worse than self-censorship during the 1930s. During that period, at least, there were concerns about the rise of the Nazis; Carl Laemmle, who produced All Quiet on the Western Front, said, “”I am almost certain that [Adolf] Hitler’s rise to power … would be the signal for a general physical onslaught on many thousands of defenseless Jewish men, women and children.” He was right. But today’s Hollywood honchos don’t see the threat of Islamism; they see instead the threat of the United States. They don’t see the threat of China; they see the threat of US imperialism. Unlike their predecessors, they are ideologically aligned, in too many cases, with America’s enemies. And when finances and ideological interests are aligned on behalf of America’s enemies, American viewers are in serious trouble.

Logged

"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

Yes, "deepen the ports in the gulf - in Charleston SC, Savannah GA and Jacksonville FL." Does anyone have a map? 57 states? Corpsman? Gift to the Queen is a DVD of his own speeches - in an unreadable format was the only good part. Russian 'Reset' that means 'Overcharged/Overloaded'. "Let's Not Spike the Football on Osama", then spike, spike, spike. "I believe in the private sector", while beating it into submission.

The main media intentionally leave it for the right wing media to cover the boneheaded parts of the administration and the material is endless. Imagine this was ANY Republican!

Of course this could go in Pathological Science. A Soviet survivor put it best, paraphrasing: The US media is worse than Soviet Pravda. There you had only one state newspaper lying to you and you knew they were lying. Here it is more believable after you hear three four, five different sources telling you the exact same lie - or ten unoriginal sources in this case spewing the same drivel.

"Global Warming: Those Tipping Points Are Closer Than You Think"--headline, WSJ.com, April 29, 2009

"Have We Reached the Tipping Point for Planet Earth?"--video title, StudioTalk.tv, May 11, 2010

"Must-Read Hansen and Sato Paper: We Are at a Climate Tipping Point That, Once Crossed, Enables Multi-Meter Sea Level Rise This Century"--headline, ThinkProgress.org, Jan. 20, 2011

"Earth: Have We Reached an Environmental Tipping Point?"--headline, BBC website, June 15, 2012

"In spite of the continued released [sic] of 90 million tons of global warming pollution every day into the atmosphere, as if it's an open sewer, we are now seeing the approach of a global political tipping point."--Al Gore, interview with Washington Post, Aug. 21, 2013

Folks have often sent links to this website. I find it non-credible. Surely Infowars gets some things correct but in fact it is just a propaganda website no better than the worst milbloggers. For instance, this entry reports that John Kerry used the 2003 Iraq photo (misused by BBC for Syria in 2012) to build his case for an attack on Syria.I watched the entire Kerry speech delivered on Friday. Kerry did not use the photo. Kerry is not my favorite politician, but truth is truth, and facts are not the specialty of Infowars. Friendly advice: I no longer click through Infowars links. They are no more reliable than Blackfive and the bottom tier milbloggers. Waste of time.

My question, why does it take a family member to do that? Don't we have a media to take care of that? Shouldn't the writers, directors and producers be deathly afraid of being called on the carpet for putting out a 'reality-based' movie full of falsehoods and having their reputations permanently destroyed by the inaccuracies? Well, they aren't. The reviewers simply call the movie 'Oscar bait". http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/movies/2013/08/15/the-butler-review/2581949/

I watched morning schmo this AM and he interviewed some Benghazi author and the interview was very similar to this. No mention whatsoever about the pre election cover up by Obama and Hillary and outright deception and lying to America for their political cover. Not a peep. Just that nothing in retrospect was done wrong in the events that led to the attack. Just that it is always easy in hindsight to retrospectively go back and find warning signs. Unbelievable. Then to sound really adorable they all croon (including Schmo) about the bravery and courage of those who were left to be murdered by those at the top (and yes, "we are here for a higher calling was a phrase used in 1975 and thus was no biggie that was used again this time). I know Americans see this but bottom line is their pocketbooks.

*****CBS Highlights Benghazi Anniversary; Fails to Mention Obama and Hillary By Name

Published: 9/3/2013 5:54 PM ET

Subscribe to Matthew Balan

By Matthew Balan

Tuesday's CBS This Morning spotlighted the upcoming one-year anniversary of the Islamist attack on the U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, but whitewashed the role of President Obama and his administration, including that of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Anchors Charlie Rose, Norah O'Donnell, and Gayle King didn't once mention Obama or Clinton's name during an interview segment with author Fred Burton.

In his new book, Burton revealed that "an unidentified security official in the Benghazi compound...messaged the U.S. embassy in Tripoli: 'Benghazi under fire, terrorist attack.'" However, Rose only vaguely referenced the White House's now-discredited talking point about the terrorist attack: "Does this book and your understanding of it suggest that everybody knew it was a planned attack, and not a surprise arising out of a protest?" [audio available here; video below]

The three anchors brought on the former diplomatic security agent to discuss "Under Fire: The Untold Story of the Attack in Benghazi". In her first question, King played up how her guest wrote, "'In this situation, there's no right or wrong decision – just the issue of reaction and survival.' So, really, take us inside that day – what happened day – these really young guys."

Burton replied, "I think the politics of this story have been put over the top, and what I wanted focus on, Gayle, was the heroism of the agents...on the ground, in this very difficult environment, trying to do the best they possibly could, based upon the circumstances that were unfolding."

King followed up with her own vague reference to the Obama administration's early talking point that the Benghazi attack was an impromptu reaction to an obscure anti-Muhammad YouTube video: "You point out this was not a ragtag team that came into the embassy that day. You said they were methodical, and they were systematic. These guys knew what they were doing."

Norah O'Donnell couldn't bring herself to use the President's name when she asked her sole question about the manhunt for the perpetrators of the terrorist attack. Instead, she used a general pronoun in reference to the United States:

NORAH O'DONNELL: It is almost a one year later since this attack happened and these four Americans were killed. And yet, those responsible are still on the loose. Why haven't we been able to catch them? What do you believe is behind the hunt for them, and why they've been so elusive?

Near the end of the end of the segment, Rose raised the issue of whether the incident was a "planned attack and not a surprise", but like his colleagues, didn't specifically mention that U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice had claimed that the assault was a "spontaneous - not a pre-meditated response" eight days later on several Sunday morning shows. CBS senior correspondent John Miller also hinted that Ambassador Chris Stevens was partially at fault:

JOHN MILLER: ...[Y]ou've got an ambassador who wants to travel. It's September 11th. It's a symbolic day for threats. And this is very typical of the Diplomatic Security Service. They're a small agency with...a very limited number of people covering 450 outposts. And usually, there is (sic) two of them – or just a handful – in a high-threat place to cover a threat like that. When the ambassador says, I want to go from Tripoli to Benghazi, nobody gets to say, well, sir, that's a bad day for that. We can't let you do that. They just mount up and go. And this is part of that story.

Exactly three weeks earlier, on the August 13, 2013 edition of CBS This Morning, correspondent John Blackstone boosted Hillary Clinton's potential 2016 presidential run, and minimized the ongoing questions about her leadership before, during, and after the attack in Benghazi. For opposition, Blackstone merely noted that "a new ad, just released by the GOP, criticizes Clinton's handling of the terrorist attack in Benghazi", without further explaining the issue.

The full transcript of the Fred Burton segment from Tuesday's CBS This Morning:

NORAH O'DONNELL: Next week marks the first anniversary of the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Four Americans were killed, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens.

GAYLE KING: For the first time, we hear from the agents assigned to protect Stevens in a new book detailing the assault. It's called 'Under Fire: The Untold Story of the Attack in Benghazi'. It's written by Fred Burton. He is a former diplomatic security agent, and a former State Department counter-terrorism deputy chief. He joins us, along with our senior correspondent – that would be John Miller, who's a former assistant FBI director. Good to see you both.

Fred Burton. I have to start with you, because I was on plane for ten hours yesterday, and I read your book from cover to cover-

FRED BURTON, CO-AUTHOR, "UNDER FIRE": Thank you-

KING: I have to say, I bugged the guy next to me – let me read you this part; let me read you this part. You know this job. You've done this job, so you how these guys were feeling. And at one point, you said, 'In this situation, there's no right or wrong decision – just the issue of reaction and survival.' So, really, take us inside that day – what happened that day – these really young guys.

BURTON: I think the politics of this story are – have been put over the top, and what I wanted focus on, Gayle, was the – the heroism of the agents – that were all very young – on the ground, in this very difficult environment, trying to do the best they possibly could, based upon the circumstances that were unfolding.

KING: But you point out this was not a ragtag team that came – came into the embassy that day. You said they were methodical, and they were systematic. These guys knew what they were doing.

BURTON: Absolutely. It was a very choreographed attack on the temporary facility, which was not up to physical security standards; which, obviously, has been discussed, as a result of the follow-on accountability review board by the State Department. But in essence, this is what diplomatic security service agents do. I investigated the last U.S. ambassador killed in the line of duty in 1988, which was Ambassador Arnie Raphel. He perished aboard Pak-1, which was the aircraft which killed the president of Pakistan. And I was all of about 24, 25-years-old at the time, and I remember just being greatly overwhelmed by circumstances. And I certainly didn't have the experience in my – in my mind, to do the job that – that it would have been a different story today if I'd gone out to do the same kind of case.

O'DONNELL: It is almost a one year later since this attack happened and these four Americans were killed. And yet, those responsible are still on the loose. Why haven't we been able to catch them? What do you believe is behind the hunt for them, and why they've been so elusive?

BURTON: Well, I personally don't believe that anybody will ever be captured and brought into a court of law to be prosecuted for this. I think the most probable outcome will be some sort of Predator drone strike on the suspects identified. It's a very hostile environment. There is no infrastructure in place, Norah, to capture these individuals. The Libyans do not have a FBI or a CIA, per se. This is a country that is like the wild, wild West-

O'DONNELL: Sure, sure-

CHARLIE ROSE: You talk about the politics of all this. But does this book and your understanding of it suggest that everybody knew it was a planned attack, and not a surprise arising out of a protest?

BURTON: Well, you look at this case, Charlie. What you have is the moment that the first round was fired, the agents that were there knew absolutely that this was a terrorist attack. That was the only outcome that they were dealing with at the moment-

ROSE: Right-

BURTON: Remember, that the counter-terrorism community is really not geared for decisions to be made at the highest level. So, there's a process that's in play; notifications are made; and, in essence, you have to have good contingency plans, so you have an appropriate response at that period of time.

KING: John what were the lessons learned in Benghazi, do you think, that will help protect other diplomats?

JOHN MILLER: Well, there's the formal essence, which will come out from the review board; and there are the informal lessons, and one of the reminders is that the ambassador is 'god'. And that is, you know, when you're in a hostile environment – the ambassador was popular there, and had operated in Benghazi before. But you've got a security package that is shrinking, and you've got an ambassador who wants to travel. It's September 11th. It's a symbolic day for threats. And this is very – this is very typical of the Diplomatic Security Service. They're a small agency with – with, you know, a very limited number of people covering 450 outposts. And usually, there is (sic) two of them – or just a handful – in a high-threat place to cover a threat like that. When the ambassador says, I want to go from Tripoli to Benghazi, nobody gets to say, well, sir, that's a bad day for that. We can't let you do that-

KING: Yes, yes-

MILLER: They just mount up and go. And this is part of that story.

KING: And the most touching thing was to remember Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Tyrone Woods, and Glen Doherty. We'll be right back.

— Matthew Balan is a news analyst at the Media Research Center. You can follow him on Twitter here.******

With of course their preferred political ideology. Naturally that is not exactly how this is worded but isn't it plainly obvious this is how one can read through this. Another example of 1% privilege for those who are connected that is exactly what I am talking about. Those 1% get many benefits the rest of us don't get. Sure if they get it fairly and squarely no problem. But if they get it through advantages only they have then of course 99% are going to be resentful. Like why is Romney paying 17% tax and I am paying well over 30%? Yes I am angry. And why is nearly half the country not paying any? OTOH hand I don't think people paying millions should pay a higher percentage either. Flat tax.

In its attempt to define who’s a journalist and who’s not, is the US Senate trying to say that Thomas Paine, a corset-maker, wouldn’t have deserved the same protections from government heavy-handedness as a newspaper publisher like Ben Franklin?

The first version of a media shield law that handily made it through the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday defined for the first time what constitutes a “real reporter” deserving of extra protection versus what Sen. Dianne Feinstein called a “17-year-old blogger” who doesn’t deserve a legal shield.

While Mr. Paine eventually edited magazines in the United States, he’s best known for his pamphleteering days, when he self-published “Common Sense,” one of the American Revolution’s most poignant calls to arms. Modern bloggers often see themselves as the inheritors of the pamphleteering tradition, and many wondered on Friday whether Paine would be covered under the proposed law.

That Congress is attempting to define “journalist” at all in order to expand protections after a number of high-profile leak cases and ensuing Justice Department prosecutions caused blog impresario Matt Drudge to call Ms. Feinstein a “fascist” on Twitter, suggesting that the law would subvert a free press by giving institutional advantage to government-approved media outlets.

“Federal judge once ruled Drudge 'is not a reporter, a journalist, or a newsgatherer,'” Mr. Drudge, proprietor of the massive news aggregator site Drudge Report, Tweeted Friday. “Millions of readers a day come for cooking recipes??!”

On its face, the proposed shield law doesn’t affect the First Amendment, which at any rate doesn’t guarantee anybody’s right to publish whatever they want. The bill simply adds extra protections against being forced to testify about sources for established reporters and freelancers with a “considerable” amount of publishing experience. It also allows a judge to make a declaration as to who’s a journalist and who’s not in an attempt to build the shield as wide as possible.

“All we’re doing is adding privilege to existing First Amendment rights, so there is, logically, zero First Amendment threat out of this,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, (D) of Rhode Island.

But conservative bloggers, including some law professors, had a different reaction, suggesting that such a law would give the Department of Justice powerful discretion that could potentially be used to intimidate amateur reporters who are also working in the public interest.

The boom in online news arguably has helped polarize the American political scene, but it has also given readers access to far more data and viewpoints than they had under the system of editors and reporters that make up the traditional American newsroom.

Moreover, largely because the First Amendment extends press freedoms to all Americans, the US has no special licensing requirements for journalists, as many other Western countries do, meaning that the shield law would be the country’s first attempt to create what critics call an “elite” tier for the institutional press.

“Journalism is an activity, not a profession,” wrote University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds, who mans the popular InstaPundit blog.

Some senators agreed. “It strikes me that we are on dangerous territory if we are drawing distinctions that are treating some engaged in the process of reporting and journalism better than others,” said Sen. Ted Cruz, (R) of Texas. “Essentially as I understand this amendment, it protects what I would characterize as the ‘corporate media’…. But it leaves out citizen bloggers.”

The intent of the federal shield is to enshrine in law what, until the Obama administration, had been maintained mostly as a tradition – that reporters shouldn’t have to testify about how or through whom they received sensitive information with a demonstrable public interest.

Fighting back against leakers like Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning, Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange, who have used the Internet to instantly disseminate vast troves of classified data and documents to the global masses, the Obama administration has prosecuted both whistleblowers and reporters who have gained access to that kind of data with an unprecedented vigilance. The administration has also been caught tapping dozens of phone lines at the Associated Press, the nation’s preeminent wire service.

(Ironically, President Obama has said he supports a shield law that critics point out has been made more necessary by the actions of his administration.)

The bill says that a "covered journalist" is a person who gathers or writes news for "an entity or service that disseminates news and information."

The bill, however, does not offer an impenetrable shield.

Federal officials can still “compel disclosure” from a reporter who has information that could prevent a murder or child kidnapping, help stop acts of terrorism, or information that could cause severe harm to national security.****

Piers Morgan: On second thought, does it really matter what kind of gun was used at the Navy Yard?

posted at 2:47 pm on September 17, 2013 by Allahpundit

Is there anyone in American media who trolls more people with less effort than this insufferable wanker? I’m not even mad. It’s a talent. If you don’t have an actual fan base, the logical thing to do when you’re not playing pattycake with celebrities is to seize a hot-button issue with both hands and start a fight over it at every opportunity. If America ever did ban guns, his first tweet the next morning would be about how, if you think about it, abortion really should be available up to and including the start of labor.

Last night’s talking point: The Navy Yard shooting proves once again why we need to get rid of “assault weapons” like the AR-15. Today’s talking point, now that we know there were no “assault weapons” involved:

Piers Morgan @piersmorgan

Lots of confusion over exactly what guns Wash Navy Yard shooter used. But do you think it matters to the victims? #GunControlNow

There’s no “confusion.” The FBI confirmed hours ago to his own network that Alexis had a shotgun and two pistols. This is simply Piers being unwilling to eat two scoops of sh*t publicly for his demagoguery yesterday. But in his defense, he’s far from alone among media gun-grabbers in that regard. And if it makes you feel better, this new tweet at least represents what’s obviously his honest view. No one who believes what Morgan believes about guns would stop logically at “assault weapons.” They’re merely a foot in the regulatory door. If Piers had his way, at a minimum we’d be talking about a ban on all semiautomatics. Not that that would have stopped Alexis either.

Via Noah Rothman, as of noon ET today, MSNBC was still running a graphic of Alexis wielding an AR-15 instead of a shotgun or pistol. Of course.

GM when I first pulled up your post and saw the picture of the person with the rifle watching over other people first looked like a prison with a guard then you see "lean forward" in the corner and I think liberal control freaks who want to monitor everything we do and control us and force us to their will. Because that is what their agenda is.

GM when I first pulled up your post and saw the picture of the person with the rifle watching over other people first looked like a prison with a guard then you see "lean forward" in the corner and I think liberal control freaks who want to monitor everything we do and control us and force us to their will. Because that is what their agenda is.

I think I have the gist of this right: Some of you may have seen that Time's cover this week in the US was about paying amateur athletes, whereas in the rest of the world it was of Putin and how he had anally raped the US. Why the difference? Well it may have something to do with the fact that the man who made the decision will be going to work for Sec. State Kerry. Quelle coincidence!

I really don't know if SSRI drugs can be blamed for the shooting as implied. There is no question these drugs help a lot of people au contraire to Michael Savage's rants. Also people who take them are often at risk of mood disorders and that is why they take them. It is always easy for those with financial/political interests to simply blame the drug. (Pat Kennedy drove into the side of the capital building because of ambien and not that he was drunk.) In this case the Navy yard shooter was delusional and indeed SSRIs do not treat delusional or hallucinatory disorders. They are not antipsychotics. If he did in fact have bipolar disorder than treating the depressive component with an SSRI while not treating the manic side could very well have led to even worse mania outbreaks. This is well know to anyone who goes to medical school. There is always some risk that a person seeks medical help during the depressive state and the doctor treats that only and then the patient actually has undiagnosed bipolar. If people are manic they feel great and don't go to the doctor unless someone else brings them in.

What I absolutely like about this article is it highlights the corruption of our big media complex. It is extraordinarily corrupt and while it is just conjecture that the media buries this because of money from big pharmaceutical companies with ad campaigns it is certainly food for thought.

Despite every indication that Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis was on SSRI drugs that have been linked to dozens of previous mass shootings, the mainstream media has once again avoided all discussion of the issue, preferring instead to blame the tragedy on a non-existent AR-15 that the gunman didn’t even use.

We now know that Alexis “had been treated since August by the Veterans Administration for his mental problems.”

As Mike Adams points out, “This is proof that Aaron Alexis was on psychiatric drugs, because that’s the only treatment currently being offered by the Veterans Administration for mental problems. Alexis’ family members also confirmed to the press that he was being “treated” for his mental health problems. Across the medical industry, “treatment” is the code word for psychiatric drugging.”

Alexis also suffered from PTSD, blackouts and anger issues – all of which are treated with SSRI drugs. The most common form of treatment for PTSD is Paroxetine, which is listed as the number 3 top violence-causing drug by the Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP).

The Navy Yard shooter was clearly on some form of psychiatric drug, but the media has shown no interest in discovering its identity.

Despite it being reported that prescription drugs were found in the apartment of ‘Batman’ shooter James Holmes days after the Aurora massacre, it took nine months to find out exactly what those drugs were. Like Columbine killer Eric Harris, Holmes had been taking Zoloft, another SSRI drug linked with violent outbursts.

The length of time it took to find out that Holmes was on Zoloft was partly because the media habitually shows zero interest in pursuing the link between anti-depressants and violence.

As the website SSRI Stories profusely documents, there are literally hundreds of examples of mass shootings, murders and other violent episodes that have been committed by individuals on psychiatric drugs over the past three decades. The number of cases is staggering.

Why is the corporate media so disinterested in pursuing this clear connection?

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the pharmaceutical giants who produce drugs like Zoloft, Prozac and Paxil spend around $2.4 billion dollars a year on direct-to-consumer television advertising every year. By running negative stories about prescription drugs, networks risk losing tens of millions of dollars in ad revenue.

While failing to ask questions about what SSRI drugs Aaron Alexis was taking prior to his rampage, the media instead blamed the shooting on assault rifles, even after it had been confirmed that no AR-15 was used by Alexis during the massacre.

FBI assistant director Victoria Parlave stated at a press conference on Tuesday that authorities, “do not have any information at this time that [Alexis] had an AR-15 in his possession.”

Despite there being no evidence that an AR-15 was used, the New York Daily News ran a front page headline yesterday morning entitled, “Same Gun Different Slay,” next to a picture of an assault rifle.

Hours after the FBI stated that no AR-15 had been used, MSNBC’s Alex Wagner, who previously blamed the Boston bombings on Alex Jones,continued to use an animated graphic depicting Alexis carrying an assault rifle during the massacre.

Anti-second amendment crusader Piers Morgan also erroneously blamed the shooting on “a man with a legally purchased AR-15, who just committed the same kind of atrocity as we saw at Sandy Hook, and Aurora,” during his CNN show on Monday.

CNN’s live news coverage also reported that Alexis had “recently purchased (an) AR-15 shotgun,” when in fact that purchase had been denied.

Both the New York Times and the Washington Post also falsely reported that an AR-15 had been found on Alexis after the massacre.

DC gun grabbers Dianne Feinstein and Dick Durbin also regurgitated the false claim that Alexis used an AR-15 during the rampage.

The US press has once again behaved like state media in the aftermath of the Navy Yard shooting by pursuing the assault rifle angle – despite the fact that it was patently false – in order to bolster the White House’s gun control agenda.

In doing so, they have concurrently buried an integral aspect of mass shootings that needs to highlighted as part of a national conversation – the clear connection between violent outbursts and SSRI drugs.*****

Though infowars may have this one right, its reputation is so deservedly bad that I would really rather have a different source for this. If this is true, surely someone else is covering this as well , , ,

The New York Post’s Michael Gartland has done more digging on the story of Wazn Miller. He is the teenager whose last moments the Newark mayor has relayed numerous times in paid speeches and on the stump, but a little fact-checking as well as the police report made public after NR sued Booker and the city of Newark revealed that Booker has taken considerable liberties with the story, inflating his own role and, it appears, outright fabricating certain details.

Here is Booker in 2007 remarks:

It seemed like a whirlwind was going on around me, so much was flashing through my mind as I sat there just trying to hold this child as his breathing stopped … The ambulance finally came, pushed me out of the way, ripped open his shirt where I now saw three gunshot wounds in his front, one in his side — and he was dead.

Here is Gartland:

Wazn Miller didn’t die in Booker’s arms — and while the then-34-year-old pol was there, he may have made matters worse. A woman was cradling the prone Miller when Miller’s friend David Estrada, 14 at the time, arrived.

“He came over and picked him up,” said Estrada, now 23. “A lot of people said, ‘You’re not supposed to move somebody after they get shot.’ The bullets might start moving around.”

Gilez Smith, 27, said he saw Miller struggling to live and described Booker’s heroics as a “ploy.”

“I told him, ‘Just leave him alone!’ ” Smith recalled. “He was like, ‘Breathe, breathe,’ smacking him all in the face . . . It was a big act.”

Miller “was still breathing” when medics put him in the ambulance, Estrada insisted.

The police report confirms Estrada’s account, not Booker’s. According to the document signed by Newark Detective Vincent Vitiello, Miller “expired from his injuries at University Hospital.”

NRO has taken issue with similar inconsistencies in Booker’s retelling of the tragic event; kudos to Gartland for tracking down witnesses.

Gartland also takes aim at several other stories that have become part of the Booker lore, among them, Booker’s drug-dealing pal T-Bone, whose existence NRO called into question after Rutgers University history professor Clement Price told us Booker conceded to him in 2008 the character was an “invention.” Garland tracked down a fellow resident of Brick Towers, the Newark housing complex where Booker lived when he claims to have met T-Bone:

“There was never a T-Bone,” said a 32-year-old former resident of Brick Towers, the former housing complex where Booker lived and where “T-Bone” supposedly plied his drug trade.

“There was a T, and there was a Bone from Prince Street,” he recalled. “T was in Brick Towers.”

T was bloodthirsty, his acquaintance recalled. “Booker and T didn’t have no run-in. If they did, Booker wouldn’t be walking around now,” he said.

Booker and his campaign are standing by his tall tale about T-Bone. Indeed, Booker is digging himself in deeper, telling NJTV’s Michael Aron not only that the charge is a “right-wing fabrication” but that, as a young man in Newark, he knew “literally hundreds” of drug dealers and that, when he became mayor, he held some sort of support meetings for them in his home and even allowed them to spend the night. What a guy.

Gartland also turns his attention to the superhero mayor’s actions in the wake of the 2010 blizzard that blanketed the northeast. Time chonicled how Booker and his staff personally shoveled streets and delivered diapers to a woman who was snowed in and couldn’t leave her home to purchase them. Gartland tracked her down:

Barbara Byers confirmed to The Post that Booker, in one of the more colorful accounts of his heroic, hands-on approach to governing, delivered Pampers to her home. But the press never questioned how she felt about it.

“I always found it weird that no one asked me about what happened,” she said. “It wasn’t that I didn’t have diapers because I didn’t go shopping. It was two days later and nobody cleared our street.

“He’s a very nice man, but he isn’t a good mayor,” she added. “If he would have done his job, I would have been able to do for myself and gone out. It took three days for someone to come by with a plow the first time.”

Then there’s Booker’s eulogy to Newark education activist Judy Diggs. It really is worth watching the video, available in full here. Diggs, Booker told a crowd of Democrats at a fundraiser outside of Newark, “was out of the most artful and eloquent user of curse words I have ever met.” “She used them like you and I would probably use punctuation marks in a sentence,” he said, to raucus laughter. Diggs, Booker recounted, had also died “a poetic death”: reading to schoolchildren. Except that she didn’t. As I noted here and as Gartland notes in his piece, Diggs died in her office.

“It makes sense for him to go to Yale and to go to Summit and tell all these stories because he don’t have to answer the questions,” Tyree Diggs said. “If he says it here [in Newark], he has all kinds of questions to answer.”

Read Gartland’s piece in its entirety here.

It’s astonishing that Booker is now 15 years into his political career, and, largely through anecdotes we are now coming to see are full of holes, has amassed dozens of high-profile backers in Silicon Valley and around the country who fell in love with his “story.” Thanks also in part to these emotional anecdotes, he is now and set to become the junior senator from New Jersey. Maybe one of these days a prominent national political reporter will ask him about what increasingly looks like his troubled relationship with the truth.

At the end of John Ford’s classic Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the editor of the local paper decides not to print the truth about who really killed the murderous Valance. “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Legends now become facts in America at almost lightning speed. Often when lies are asserted as truth, they become frozen in time. Even the most damning later exposure of their falsity never quite erases their currency. As Jonathan Swift sighed, “Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.”

After the recent shooting tragedy at the Washington Navy Yard, cable news shows, newspaper reports, and talking heads immediately blasted lax gun laws. The killer, Aaron Alexis, had mowed down 20 innocent people — twelve of them fatally — with yet again the satanic AR-15 semi-automatic “assault” rifle. The mass murdering was supposedly more proof of the lethal pathologies of the National Rifle Association and the evil shooter crowd that prevents good people from enacting proper gun-control laws. Once more an iconic tragedy had the chance — in a way that even the near-simultaneous shooting of 13 in Chicago did not — to energize the nation to do the right thing and ensure that no other such mayhem would follow.

Then the assault weapon vanished into fantasy. Instead, over the course of the week, it was slowly learned that the unhinged Alexis had somehow passed at least two background checks, legally bought a shotgun, modified it, and for 30 minutes shot and reloaded it to slaughter the innocent. Are we to outlaw the owning of shotguns despite background checks and lawful purchases? Vice President Joe Biden, remember, had recently urged Americans to obtain old-fashioned, all-American shotguns for protection rather than dangerous semi-automatic assault rifles. If a shotgun could be used to commit mass murder in the middle of a military installation, how could any gun-control law, short of the confiscation of all guns, ensure that such heinous crimes could not be repeated?

Few seem interested in other, less politically correct, less melodramatic solutions. It was reported that Alexis had been treated for severe bouts of mental illness, yet apparently without endangering his security clearances. Like the deranged Sandy Hook mass murderer, Adam Lanza, Alexis was also pathologically addicted to playing violent video games for hours on end. Further controversy arose over the fact that most military personnel are not allowed to carry weapons at facilities like the Navy Yard.

Unfortunately, few of our elites dared to question the mental-health industry’s approach to treating the unstable, especially its resistance to properly monitoring whether those being treated as outpatients are taking their medications. Few faulted the entertainment industry for the savage genre of the modern video game. Should we also blame the incompetence of the agencies that conducted the background checks? Was the Pentagon to blame for not allowing military personnel and contractors to carry weapons while on their own federal military facilities?

After all, none of those considerations served the larger progressive purpose of restricting gun use and ownership. More likely, these other disturbing truths threatened liberal assumptions about First Amendment rights and freedom of expression. If the white extremist Timothy McVeigh, the iconic anti-government terrorist, long ago showed us how generic right-wing extremism could lead to atrocities such as the Oklahoma bombing, then the African-American, pro-Obama, Buddhist, Thai-speaking Aaron Alexis, who murdered without an AR-15, was hardly useful as an indictment of much of anything deemed Neanderthal.

All this is old hat. We still do not know exactly what happened that night of the tragic fatal confrontation between Travyon Martin and George Zimmerman. But we at least do know that most of the fables initially peddled by the media were demonstrably false — but even now not remembered as demonstrably false. George Zimmerman was not a bigoted “white Hispanic” who used racist language in his 911 call as he deliberately hunted down a black suspect. And he really did suffer visibly bleeding head wounds from a hard blow of some sort from Trayvon Martin. The latter was not a diminutive model student or the vulnerable pre-teen pictured in most media photos. Even photoshopping and doctoring tapes could not create a teachable moment out of such chaos.

No matter; such a moment was created anyway. Without any statistical support, our moral censors still wished to traffic in narratives of white racist vigilantes hunting down innocent African-American male teens. That narrative served as a reminder of why we have a civil-rights movement of the sort championed by the likes of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, who fiddle while thousands of minority youths are gunned down each year in our inner cities. In other words, as far as the Zimmerman trial went, the human story of tragedy, misjudgment, accident, reaction, and overreaction simply did not serve the larger liberal effort to address perceived issues of social justice. Tragedy was better served by melodrama, and both Zimmerman and Martin became cutout caricatures rather than tragic individuals.

The same may be unfortunately true of the infamous Matthew Shepard case. The savagely murdered gay youth was probably not, as we were told for years, the victim of the rage of Wyoming redneck homophobes, energized in their hatred by the sexual prejudices of an intolerant culture. The truth was more complicated, though Shepard’s fate just as tragic.

A 13-year-long investigation by a gay writer, who reexamined the Shepard case with the intention of writing a screenplay, instead suggests that it might be more likely that Shepard was cruelly tortured and beaten into a coma by methamphetamine-crazed psychotics, who may on prior occasions have shared their drug use with Shepard and intended to rob him. For all their crude macho talk, the two evil perpetrators may have been bisexual themselves. Shepard’s own homosexuality, in other words, seems to have been incidental to, not the cause of, his lamentable death. If Shepard’s sad fate must be an icon of anything, it more likely serves as a warning that the vicious meth cartels in rural America are out of control, and the addicted can ensnare and murder anyone, including naïve college students. Again, no matter — what was false has served noble purposes in a way that what was true will not.

Many of the progressive tales that Americans grew up with in the 20th century have also been proven either noble lies or half-truths. The American Left has canonized the narrative that anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti were framed, subjected to a show trial, and then executed as a result of widespread American prejudice, xenophobia, and reactionary fear-mongering. Their executions sparked worldwide protests, novels, and plays reacting to the intolerance of a morally suspect America. Yet decades later, most historians, while they concede that the trials of 1921 did not match jurisprudence of a near-century later — nevertheless also quietly accept that the two were indeed anarchist terrorists, and at least one was probably guilty of armed robbery and murder, and the other of being an accessory after the fact. Bigots do not always arrive at bigoted verdicts.

Liberal culture likewise assumed that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed on false charges of spying for the Soviet Union and that at least one of them had not really passed on secrets about the American atomic-bomb project. The two accused became causes célèbres as thousands worldwide rallied to save them from dangerous American know-nothings. Their messy electrocutions were supposedly likewise symptomatic of a paranoid America lashing out at easy victims in an era of Red-baiting, anti-Semitism, and rank McCarthyism.

The truth was in comparison banal. While we know that the Soviets would probably have gotten the H-bomb soon anyway, and that they claimed they were still our allies when they received top-secret American information, and while we know too that today the Rosenbergs would probably have received 20-year sentences, we also know from Soviet archives that they both worked as Soviet spies, who passed to our enemies information about nuclear weapons and other valuable classified projects.

There was no greater liberal icon than Alger Hiss, a smooth, debonair diplomat and foundation head, who likewise was supposedly ground up by the right-wing buzz saw with unfounded charges of spying and treason. While we are still not sure of the degree of damage that Hiss actually did, it is clear that he was at some point in his life a Soviet spy — a damning fact for an American diplomat at times entrusted with matters of the nation’s security during the early Cold War. That disturbing truth, however, was minor in comparison to the larger untruth that the Hiss case represented the dangerous excesses of reactionary America. So Hiss became a sort of progressive Great Gatsby, a fake, self-inventing himself into something grand that he was not.

In recent memory, several popular icons of revolutionary resistance have been revealed as frauds and worse. Che Guevara — locks, beard, and motorcycle — was a psychotic thug who enjoyed executing his political opponents. Bill Ayers by his own admission was “guilty as hell” of being a violent terrorist; until he had the bad luck of hawking on 9/11 his memoir of his terrorist days, he was on the road to canonization. Rigoberta Menchú was not quite a gifted author who revealed the horrors of right-wing repression in a cry-of-the-heart memoir of resistance. More likely, she fabricated stories in service to her perceived higher calling of exposing brutal reactionary class violence against the poor.

Popular icon Mumia Abu-Jamal was not framed for a crime he did not commit because of endemic institutionalized racism, but rather really did shoot and kill a Philadelphia police officer. All the progressive protests in the world cannot alter that fact. Angela Davis was not quite a sincere advocate of those unduly incarcerated. While a jury found that the guns she supplied a number of San Francisco murderers did not constitute her own culpability for the attack on the Marin County courthouse, she was nonetheless an unrepentant Stalinist. Of those who suffered in the Communist archipelago, she once scoffed, “They deserve what they get. Let them remain in prison.”

In more recent days, from Tawana Brawley to the Duke lacrosse team, the theme remains disturbingly the same: The original progressive untruth proves far stronger than subsequent pedestrian correction. The point was not that the Duke players did not rape a black stripper and commit a “hate crime,” but that they were the sort who in theory could have, and she was the sort who in theory could have been raped by virtue of her race and gender — a virtual truth that trumps a known lie.

We are left not with the truth that Aaron Alexis bought a shotgun to murder, but with the conjecture that he could have bought legally an AR-15 and therefore in some sense figuratively did — despite the later and less publicized corrections. If it takes some mythologies about Matthew Shepard to expose the plague of homophobia, why indict a noble lie to promote an ignoble truth? What difference does it make what actually happened between shooter Wesley Cook and slain officer Daniel Faulkner, when the Mumia myth serves larger agencies of social change?

Like Orwell’s dead souls, we live in an age of statist mythology, in which unpleasant facts are replaced by socially useful lies. So we print the legend that better serves our fantasies.

Our friends at the Cable News Network are objecting to our Thursday editorial ("Holocaust Denial in Translation") that noted subtle but significant discrepancies between what Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, speaking in Persian, told CNN's Christiane Amanpour, and what CNN's viewers heard in the English translation of his remarks. In a Twitter post, Ms. Amanpour insists that "CNN reported exactly what Rouhani said."

Er, not exactly, Christiane.

Ms. Amanpour's interview is gaining notice because it seemed to have Mr. Rouhani denouncing the Holocaust. CNN's English transcript of the interview quotes the Iranian leader as "speaking of the dimensions of the Holocaust" (our emphasis), while adding that "whatever criminality they [the Nazis] committed against the Jews, we condemn."

But as we pointed out in the editorial, Mr. Rouhani never uses the word "Holocaust." He merely speaks of "aspects of historical events." Our independent translation of Mr. Rouhani's remarks confirms this, as does Arash Karami of the Iran Pulse website, as does the transcript provided by Mr. Rouhani's office, as does the semi-official Fars news agency, which is demanding its own correction from CNN.

The point may seem small to Western ears, but it's significant in the context of a regime for which Holocaust denial is an article of ideological faith. Ditto for the second comment: Mr. Rouhani did not speak narrowly of Nazi crimes against Jews, but more broadly of crimes "against the Jews and the non-Jews." This distinction is also important, because central to the claims of Holocaust revisionists is the lie that Jews were not the deliberate and principal target of Nazi genocide.

Lest there be any doubt about Mr. Rouhani's careful word play, he also weighed in on the subject during an appearance this week at the Council on Foreign Relations. "We condemn the crimes by Nazis in the World War II," he said, again without speaking of a Holocaust. "And regrettably those crimes were committed against many groups, many people, many people were killed including a group of Jewish people."

As the New York Sun points out, "a group of Jewish people" is a telling way to describe the six million murdered by the Nazis. Maybe Mr. Rouhani has to be so rhetorically evasive because Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has denounced "the myth of the massacre of Jews known as the holocaust"—a statement you can find on his official, English-language website.

Meantime, we note with amusement that Ms. Amanpour objects to our agreeing with the accuracy of the Fars translation, as opposed to CNN's: "Stunned by willingness of [Wall Street Journal editorial] page and others to jump into bed with Iranian extremist mouthpiece like FARS." Which is funny, because the interpreter on whom CNN relied for its mistranslation was part of Mr. Rouhani's Iranian government entourage.

So we will not be offering an apology to CNN, though we will be happy to accept theirs.

Exactly. Look what happened to Weiner. He leads in the NYC polls and then more pictures come out about him doing the same thing AFTER first being exposed. But that was not what did him in. Its was the comparisons to the Clintons. That is what got the MSM decidedly motivated to trash him. Can't have him hurt politically their '16 candidate:

On the same day, CNN and NBC both dropped their plans to make movies about Hillary Clinton. Interestingly, it looks like a win both for the Clintons and for RNC chair Reince Priebus, who boldly told the two networks that they wouldn't be moderating any GOP presidential debates in 2015 or 2016 with those promotional films in the pipeline.

Apologies might be owed from The Wall Street Journal editorial page, which prematurely waved a white flag: "God grant Reince Priebus the serenity to accept liberal media bias. ... The Hollywood-media complex is going to line up hard behind Hillary's 2016 Presidential bid, and this is the first salvo. Mr. Priebus can't stop it, he can't even hope to contain it, so all he has done is open himself to complaints that he's acting as Lord Republican Media Censor."

The same charges of censorship aren't often lobbed at the Clintons, whose idea of "message discipline" doesn't just pertain to their own statements, but toward "discipline" of anyone who might damage their lifelong narrative of ambition.

Charles Ferguson, the leftist documentarian signed up by CNN Films, wrote a commentary for The Huffington Post explaining why he was canceling his movie. "When I approached people for interviews, I discovered that nobody, and I mean nobody, was interested in helping me make this film. Not Democrats, not Republicans — and certainly nobody who works with the Clintons, wants access to the Clintons, or dreams of a position in a Hillary Clinton administration."

Then he added: "Not even journalists who want access, which can easily be taken away."

Ferguson's road to nowhere began with a Hillary Clinton functionary named Nick Merrill. "He interrogated me; at first I answered, but eventually I stopped." Hillary would not agree to an off-the-record conversation. Longtime aide Phillippe Reines "contacted various people at CNN, interrogated them, and expressed concern about alleged conflicts of interest generated because my film was a for-profit endeavor."

CNN declined to comment on this pressure campaign. Ferguson said he believed that Clinton aides tried to stonewall his attempts to persuade people to talk on camera. "They knew this wasn't a whitewash," he said. "And my very strong impression was that anything other than a whitewash is something they don't want to support."

Such is the power the Clintons wield over the national media.

There is still one Hillary movie project on the horizon, a biographical film called "Rodham" that focuses on Hillary's 1974 work for the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate probe. An early script leak to the Daily Beast had fictional — and sensationalistic — elements. Hillary is asked if she and Bill have premarital sex, and she replies, "It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'sex' means."

The leaked script also suggests Hillary had a flirty relationship with Bill Weld, the future liberal Republican governor of Massachusetts (who also served on the House Watergate effort). That ends when young Slick Willie calls on her birthday and plays the saxophone over the telephone, both "Happy Birthday" and "Hail to the Chief." This apparently seals their lifelong bond.

The early script also had Hillary dropping all kinds of F-bombs, especially of the "mother" variety, "much to Bill's delight." It shouldn't be shocking to find that the moviemakers are hiking backwards on this vulgar trail. James Ponsoldt, the director attached to the project, told The Atlantic Wire that he's "not really interested in airing the dirty laundry of famous people" and the story "predates any of the feelings people have about the Clintons, for better or for worse," but that is simply not true.

The New York Times reported that a "person briefed on the film's progress said the script had been toned down" after the script leaked, and "the new version, this person said, will be more genteel, with a greater focus on the love story." Because, as we all know, the Clintons would like the media elites to describe Bill's romantic style as "more genteel."

It remains to be seen if this Watergate-era project is any more likely to be finished than the CNN and NBC films. It currently has no cast and no financing. The political '70s aren't churning out hits. In recent years, Oliver Stone's "Nixon" and Ron Howard's "Frost/Nixon" grossed $13 million and $18 million in America, respectively.

The likeliest Hillary movie on the horizon is another documentary from the feisty conservatives of Citizens United. When they produced "Hillary: The Movie" in 2008, Clinton liberals took them all the way to the Supreme Court, only to lose. Part Deux should be a doozy.

L. Brent Bozell III is the president of the Media Research Center. To find out more about Brent Bozell III, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

My vote would go to either Steyn or Marc Levin. "Can you imagine" Marc Levin going up against Paul Krugman on prime time? Yes that would be great. I doubt Levin would want to be on network TV though. Especially ABC. Yet it would be good for the cause to have a great spokesperson on a MSM. Will occasionally makes a few good points but he is tired and NOT much of a spokesperson for conservatives. Levin love him or hate him would fire shots heard around the world. Will whispers and few hear. Just my take.

The charge: Both the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League have labeled the group that Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller founded as an anti-Muslim hate group.

The facts: Robert Spencer is no more “anti-Muslim” than foes of the Nazis were “anti-German.” It has become common, because of the efforts of Islamic supremacist and Leftist groups, to equate resistance to jihad terror with “hate,” but there is no substance to this. Spencer’s work has been entirely dedicated to defending the freedom of speech and the principle of equality of rights for all people before the law.

The SPLC keeps tabs on neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups. And that is good. But the implication of their hate group label is that the group that Spencer and Geller founded, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, is another one of those, which is false. While the SPLC may have done good work in the 1960s against white racists, in recent years it has become a mere propaganda organ for the Left, tarring any group that dissents from its extreme political agenda as a “hate group.” Significantly, although it lists hundreds of groups as “hate groups,” it includes not a single Islamic jihad group on this list. And its “hate group” designation against the Family Research Council led one of its followers to storm the FRC offices with a gun, determined to murder the chief of the FRC. This shows that these kinds of charges shouldn’t be thrown around frivolously, as tools to demonize and marginalize those whose politics the SPLC dislikes. But that is exactly what they do. Its hard-Left leanings are well known and well documented. This Weekly Standard article sums up much of what is wrong with the SPLC.

The ADL traffics in the same reckless defamation. They have libeled the preeminent lawyer and orthodox Jew David Yerushalmi as an “extremist,” an “anti-Muslim bigot” and a “white supremacist.” The ADL has even condemned Israel for fighting anti-Semitism. According to Charles Jacobs of Americans for Peace and Tolerance: “The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) – biggest Jewish ‘defense’ organization — admits in private that the biggest danger to Jews since WWII comes from Muslim Jew-hatred, but because it fears offending its liberal donors and being charged with ‘Islamophobia,’ the organization remains essentially silent on the issue. In a study of ADL press releases from 1995 to 2011– a good if not perfect indicator of ADL priorities – we found that only 3 percent of ADL’s press releases focus on Islamic extremism and Arab anti-Semitism.” (For the full study, see www.charlesjacobs.org.)

The ADL has defamed many people. The ADL was successfully sued for over $10 million for defaming a Colorado couple, whom they accused of bigotry. The judgment was confirmed by every court that reviewed it, and was ultimately paid by the ADL. This was the largest defamation judgment in the history of the State of Colorado — paid by the Anti-Defamation League.

The charge: Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller were both banned from Britain because of their founding of “anti-Muslim hate groups.”

The facts: The letter to Spencer from the UK Home Office said he was banned for saying: “[Islam] is a religion and is a belief system that mandates warfare against unbelievers for the purpose for establishing a societal model that is absolutely incompatible with Western society because media and general government unwillingness to face the sources of Islamic terrorism these things remain largely unknown.” This is a garbled version of what Spencer actually said, which is that Islam in its traditional formulations and core texts mandates warfare against and the subjugation of unbelievers. This is not actually a controversial point to anyone who has studied Islam. Imran Ahsan Khan Nyazee, Assistant Professor on the faculty of Shari’ah and Law of the International Islamic University in Islamabad, in his 1994 book The Methodology of Ijtihad quotes the twelfth century Maliki jurist Ibn Rushd: “Muslim jurists agreed that the purpose of fighting with the People of the Book…is one of two things: it is either their conversion to Islam or the payment of jizyah.” Nyazee concludes: “This leaves no doubt that the primary goal of the Muslim community, in the eyes of its jurists, is to spread the word of Allah through jihad, and the option of poll-tax [jizya] is to be exercised only after subjugation” of non-Muslims.

A Shafi’i manual of Islamic law endorsed by the most prestigious institution in Sunni Islam, Al-Azhar University in Cairo, says that the leader of the Muslims “makes war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians…until they become Muslim or else pay the non-Muslim poll tax,” and cites Qur’an 9:29 in support of this idea: “Fight those who do not believe in Allah and the Last Day and who forbid not what Allah and His messenger have forbidden-who do not practice the religion of truth, being of those who have been given the Book-until they pay the poll tax out of hand and are humbled.” [‘Umdat al-Salik o9.8]

Also, the assumption that the British government is fair, consistent, and judicious in such judgments is false. Just days before Spencer and Geller were banned, the British government admitted Saudi Sheikh Mohammed al-Arefe. Al-Arefe has said: “Devotion to jihad for the sake of Allah, and the desire to shed blood, to smash skulls, and to sever limbs for the sake of Allah and in defense of His religion, is, undoubtedly, an honor for the believer. Allah said that if a man fights the infidels, the infidels will be unable to prepare to fight.”

That was acceptable in Britain. Spencer’s work, which has consistently been in defense of human rights, was not. He has never advocated for or condoned violence. Spencer and Geller are challenging this capricious decision and are confident they will prevail.

The charge: Robert Spencer inspired the Norwegian terrorist mass murder Anders Behring Breivik, who cited Spencer many times in his manifesto.

The facts: This charge is meant to imply that Spencer calls for violence and that Breivik heeded his call. This is absolutely false. In all his quotations of Spencer, Breivik never quotes him calling for or justifying violence – because he never does. In fact, Breivik even criticized him for not doing so, saying of Spencer, historian Bat Ye’or and other critics of jihad terror: “If these authors are to [sic] scared to propagate a conservative revolution and armed resistance then other authors will have to.” (Breivik, 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, p. 743) Breivik explains in his manifesto that he was “radicalized” by his experiences with Muslim immigrants in the early 1990s, before Spencer had published anything about Islam (See Breivik, p. 1348).

Breivik also hesitantly but unmistakably recommended making common cause with jihadists, which neither Spencer nor any other opponent of jihad would ever do: “An alliance with the Jihadists might prove beneficial to both parties but will simply be too dangerous (and might prove to be ideologically counter-productive). We both share one common goal.” (Breivik, p. 948). He even called for making common cause with Hamas in plotting jihad terror: “Approach a representative from a Jihadi Salafi group. Get in contact with a Jihadi strawman. Present your terms and have him forward them to his superiors….Present your offer. They are asked to provide a biological compound manufactured by Muslim scientists in the Middle East. Hamas and several Jihadi groups have labs and they have the potential to provide such substances. Their problem is finding suitable martyrs who can pass ‘screenings’ in Western Europe. This is where we come in. We will smuggle it in to the EU and distribute it at a target of our choosing. We must give them assurances that we are not to harm any Muslims etc.” (Breivik, p. 949)

Investigative journalist and author Daniel Greenfield explained:

Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic goes so far as to call a prominent researcher into Islamic terrorism, Robert Spencer, a jihadist. The Washington Post admits that Spencer and other researchers are not responsible for the shootings, but sneers nonetheless. And the New York Times and a number of other outlets have picked and touted the “64 times” that Spencer was quoted in the shooter’s manifesto…

The “64 times” cited by the Times and its imitators reflects lazy research since the majority of those quotes actually come from a single document, where Spencer is quoted side by side with Tony Blair and Condoleezza Rice….

Many of the other Spencer quotes are actually secondhand from essays written by Fjordman that also incorporate selections of quotes on Islam and its historical background. Rather than Breivik quoting Spencer, he is actually quoting Fjordman who is quoting Spencer.

Quite often, Robert Spencer is quoted providing historical background on Islam and quotes from the Koran and the Hadith. So, it’s actually Fjordman quoting Spencer quoting the Koran. If the media insists that Fjordman is an extremist and Spencer is an extremist — then isn’t the Koran also extremist?

And if the Koran isn’t extremist, then how could quoting it be extremist?

The New York Times would have you believe that secondhand quotes like these from Spencer turned Breivik into a raging madman….

Breivik was driven by fantasies of seizing power, combined with steroid abuse and escapism. He used quotes from researchers into terrorism to pad out his schizophrenic worldview, combined with fantasies of multiple terrorist cells and an eventual rise to power.

This is not so different from lunatics who picked up a copy of “Catcher in the Rye” and then set off to kill a celebrity. A not uncommon event, for which J.D. Salinger bears no responsibility whatsoever.

The charge: Robert Spencer denies the Srebrenica genocide and justifies Serbian war crimes against Muslims.

The facts: This charge implies that Spencer approves of violence against innocent Muslims, which is absolutely false. It is based on two (out of over 40,000) articles published at Jihad Watch in 2005 and 2009 questioning whether the massacre of Muslim civilians in Srebrenica in 1995, which was unquestionably heinous, rises to the level of an attempt to exterminate an entire people. Neither was written by Spencer and neither approves of the killing of Muslims or anyone. In ”Srebrenica as Genocide? The Krstić Decision and the Language of the Unspeakable,” published in the Yale Human Rights & Development Law Journal, Vol. VIII in 2005, Katherine G. Southwick writes:

In August 2001, a trial chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) handed down the tribunal’s first genocide conviction. In this landmark case, Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstić, the trial chamber determined that the 1995 Srebrenica massacres—in which Bosnian Serb forces executed 7,000-8,000 Bosnian Muslim men—constituted genocide. This Note acknowledges the need for a dramatic expression of moral outrage at the most terrible massacre in Europe since the Second World War. However, this Note also challenges the genocide finding. By excluding consideration of the perpetrators’ motives for killing the men, such as seeking to eliminate a military threat, the Krstić chamber’s method for finding specific intent to destroy the Bosnian Muslims, in whole or in part, was incomplete. The chamber also loosely construed other terms in the genocide definition, untenably broadening the meaning and application of the crime. The chamber’s interpretation of genocide in turn has problematic implications for the tribunal, enforcement of international humanitarian law, and historical accuracy. Thus highlighting instances where inquiry into motives may be relevant to genocide determinations, this Note ultimately argues for preserving distinctions between genocide and crimes against humanity, while simultaneously expanding the legal obligation to act to mass crimes that lack proof of genocidal intent

If Spencer is guilty of “genocide denial,” so also is the Yale Human Rights & Development Law Journal. In reality, neither are. The raising of legitimate questions does not constitute either the denial or the excusing of the evils that Serbian forces perpetrated at Srebrenica or anywhere else.

The charge: Robert Spencer blames all Muslims for the crimes of Islamic jihad terrorists who are condemned by the vast majority of peaceful Muslims.

The facts: This charge is never accompanied by any quote from Robert Spencer, because it has no basis in reality whatsoever. He has never blamed all Muslims for the crimes of jihad terrorists. He has called upon peaceful Muslims to acknowledge the fact that Islamic jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and supremacism, and to take action to mitigate the ability of these texts to incite violence. This call has not generally been heeded.

The charge: Spencer has argued that there is no distinction between American Muslims and radical, violent jihadists.

The facts: What Spencer actually said was that U.S. Muslim organizations have been slow to expel violent jihadists or report their activities, and so they move freely among peaceful Muslims. He was referring to the fact that there is no institutional distinction between Muslims who reject jihad terror and those who embrace, so jihadis move freely in Muslim circles among those who oppose them and claim to do so. In other words, there are no “Islamic supremacist” mosques and “moderate” mosques. There are just mosques, and there are both peaceful Muslims and jihadis in some of them. The Tsarnaev brothers, who bombed the Boston Marathon in April 2013, were members in good standing of the Islamic Society of Boston. The Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s most vocal Muslim organization, has counseled Muslims in the U.S. not to speak to the FBI.

The charge: Spencer and Pamela Geller sponsored ads that equated all Muslims with savages.

The facts: In reality, the ad said: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat jihad.” The savages to which the ad was referring, obviously, were those jihadis who have massacred innocent Israeli civilians such as the Fogel family and celebrated those massacres.

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"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

At this point, really, what difference does having an election make? Watching Sunday's Good Morning America, you get the feeling that the liberal media have already anointed our country’s next president. On the October 20 edition of the program, ABC’s Martha Raddatz declared that Hillary Clinton was “on fire” while campaigning for Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe on Saturday.

Co-anchor Dan Harris kicked off the Hillary watch by pretending that Mrs. Clinton was making a comeback: “[A] lot of people talking this morning about the return of Hillary Clinton, attending her first political rally in four years on Saturday.” [See video below the break.]

Was Hillary ever gone? She was in the spotlight as U.S. Secretary of State for four years, and since leaving that post she has appeared at numerous public events, if not campaign rallies. In addition, the media have been talking about her 2016 presidential aspirations from the moment she left the State Department until now. Far from making a comeback, she has been in the media spotlight essentially since 1991, when her husband began to run for president.

Harris then brought Raddatz into the discussion, and the senior foreign affairs correspondent cheered Mrs. Clinton’s campaign appearance: “This was the first explicitly political event for Hillary Clinton in four years, and she was on fire campaigning for the Virginia gubernatorial candidate, her old friend Terry McAuliffe. She was a big draw, lots of applause and lots of fire bombs aimed at the Republicans.”

Raddatz then excitedly relayed one of Clinton’s so-called “fire bombs” aimed at the GOP:

"Listen to this one. 'Recently in Washington, unfortunately we've seen examples of the wrong kind of leadership,' Clinton said. 'When politicians choose scorched earth over common ground, when they operate in what I call the evidence-free zone, ideology trumping everything else, that is not the kind of leadership we need in Virginia and America today,' she added."

It’s interesting how a journalist can get so excited when a Democrat throws a “fire bomb” at the Republican Party. Republicans who launch similar attacks on Democrats are routinely denounced as divisive ideologues who care more about their party than the country. Case in point: how the media have treated Ted Cruz recently.

What’s more, this speech that featured “lots of fire bombs aimed at the Republicans,” according to Raddatz, also included a call for national unity to replace division. According to ABCNews.com, Mrs. Clinton made this remark: “I don’t have to tell you, I hope, that the whole country is watching this election. Watching to see whether the voters of Virginia lead the way of turning from divisive politics, getting back to common sense and common ground.” But nobody at GMA bothered to mention this hypocrisy.

This is hardly the first time Raddatz has fawned over Hillary. Back in January, after Mrs. Clinton testified before the Senate on Benghazi, Raddatz described her as “combative, charming, disarming and clearly ready for a fight.” In May 2012, Raddatz exclaimed that the then-secretary of state was “cool” and “trending.” And on yesterday’s This Week, which aired shortly after GMA, Raddatz could barely contain her elation at the thought of Hillary running for president.

Below is a transcript of the segment:

DAN HARRIS: Shifting gears now, a lot of people talking this morning about the return of Hillary Clinton, attending her first political rally in four years on Saturday. There she is at a campaign event for her old friend Terry McAuliffe, who is running for governor in Virginia.

HILLARY CLINTON: I've been out of politics for a few years now and I've had a chance to think a lot about what makes our country so great.

HARRIS: As you might imagine, this has set off another feverish round of tea leaf-reading about Hillary’s potential presidential ambitions. So let's go to Washington now and ABC’s Martha Raddatz, who is filling in for George Stephanopoulos on This Week. Martha, good morning. Since leaving the State Department, Hillary has studiously avoided politics -- until now. So what, if anything, should we read into yesterday's appearance?

MARTHA RADDATZ: Well, good morning to you, Dan. You know, those tea leaves seem to be easier to read this morning. This was the first explicitly political event for Hillary Clinton in four years and she was on fire campaigning for the Virginia gubernatorial candidate, her old friend Terry McAuliffe. She was a big draw, lots of applause and lots of fire bombs aimed at the Republicans. Listen to this one. “Recently in Washington, unfortunately we've seen examples of the wrong kind of leadership,” Clinton said. “When politicians choose scorched earth over common ground, when they operate in what I call the evidence-free zone, ideology trumping everything else, that is not the kind of leadership we need in Virginia and America today,” she added. She is a long way from announcing anything, Dan, but each day it seems clear that Hillary Clinton is itching to get back in the political theater.

HARRIS: Yeah, that does not sound like the rhetoric of somebody who has forsaken politics permanently.

RADDATZ: Certainly doesn’t.

HARRIS: Martha, thank you. And by the way, we're looking forward to watching you on This Week this morning.

Good episode tonight of Crossfire: Newt, Van Jones, Howard Dean (who actually was thoughtful and respectful!-- maybe being out of power suits him , , ,) and some Rep congressman. Good conversation by bright, well informed people. Though he is of "the enemy" I must say that VJ handles himself graciously. He is intelligent, and comes prepared. He and Newt seem to interact well. Newt seems well suited to this format.

Harvard Medical School, his accident, his work and his criticisms of this President.

"Krauthammer, 63, sits atop one of the highest perches in the news media. Every night on Fox News' Special Report, he is the star of Bret Baier's political panel. Every Friday, his column appears in the Washington Post and scores of other papers (he won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for commentary)."

As the election drew near, Republicans in districts with Fox News became more likely to vote with their party, and Republicans in districts without Fox News less likely to vote with their party. Democrats, however, behaved the opposite. Democrats in districts with Fox News became less likely to vote with other Democrats.

Judge Andrew Napolitano is trying to calm his outraged followers after the cancellation of his Fox Business show.

The low-rated network axed "Freedom Watch," along with the rest of its prime-time lineup, last week.

Ever since then, Napolitano has had to send repeated messages to his fans to stop bombarding Fox News with angry emails.

In his latest note, posted to his Facebook page on Monday, Napolitano sounded a note of optimism, even as he sternly told his team to cut it out:

In television, shows are cancelled all the time. Two of my former shows have been cancelled, and after each cancellation, Fox has rewarded me with more and better work. This cancellation--along with others that accompanied it--was the result of a business judgment here, and is completely unrelated to the FreedomWatch message. It would make a world of a difference for all of us, if you would KINDLY STOP SENDING EMAILS TO FOX. I am well. Your values are strong. I will continue to articulate those values here at Fox. But the emails many of you are sending are unfairly interfering with my work and that of my colleagues here. The emails even violate our values because they interfere with the use of private property. I have accepted the cancellation decision with good cheer and a sense of gearing up for the future. You should as well. As a favor to me, and as I have asked this past weekend, PLEASE STOP SENDING EMAILS TO MY COLLEAGUES AT FOX ABOUT THE CANCELLATION OF FreedomWatch; and please stop NOW.

Somewhere in the congressional thread over the summer I think we came to agreement that both parties were guilty of hypocrisy on the question of ending the filibuster in the Senate. Republicans threatened to change the rules and Dems screamed about how wrong it was. Now Dems did it and Republicans are upset. It depends on who is in power. Bias from the inside the political arena perhaps is normal, expected, even 'rational'.

Good thing we have these great unbiased institutions reporting on it all known as the mainstream media, who can just look at it with consistency and objectivity.

Enter the NY Times. It would "desecrate" the Senate if the R's do it, but merely allow for a vote if the Dems do it.

NYT, 2005, A Republican proposal that never happened "would DESECRATE the Senate’s time-honored deliberative role and of its protection of minority rights":

"Of all the hollow arguments Senate Republicans have made in their attempt to scrap the opposition’s right to have a say on President Bush’s judicial nominees, the one that’s most hypocritical insists that history is on their side in demanding a “simple up-or-down vote” on the Senate floor. Republicans and Democrats have used a variety of tactics, from filibuster threats to stealthy committee inaction on individual nominations, in blocking hundreds of presidential appointments across history, including about one in five Supreme Court nominees. This is all part of the Senate’s time-honored deliberative role and of its protection of minority rights, which Republican leaders would now desecrate in overreaching from their majority perch."

"Democrats have hardly been obstructionists in their constitutional role of giving advice and consent; they have confirmed more than 200 Bush nominees, while balking at a mere seven who should be blocked on the merits, not for partisan reasons. This is a worthy fight, and the filibuster is a necessary weapon, considering that these are lifetime appointments to the powerful appellate judiciary, just below the Supreme Court. In more than two centuries, only 11 federal judges have been impeached for abusive court behavior. Clearly, uninhibited Senate debate in the deliberative stage, with the minority’s voice preserved, is a crucial requirement."

"Senator Frist, with the help of Vice President Dick Cheney, would sidestep a Senate precedent requiring two-thirds’ approval for a rules change and instead have a simple majority strike down the filibuster on judicial nominees. He promises that there would be no effect on other legislation, but the damage would be incalculable. Democrats are already vowing procedural paybacks and gridlock."

"A few moderate senators from both parties – realizing that the Senate’s prestige is at stake, as much as its history – are seeking a compromise. We hope President Bush will step in to help find a solution. Otherwise, warns his fellow Republican Arlen Specter, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the result will be the harmful crimping of minority rights in a proud deliberative body and “a dark, protracted era of divisive partisanship.” "

That all makes sense as long as they are consistent.

NY Times, 2013:

"For five years, Senate Republicans have refused to allow confirmation votes on dozens of perfectly qualified candidates nominated by President Obama for government positions. They tried to nullify entire federal agencies by denying them leaders. They abused Senate rules past the point of tolerance or responsibility. And so they were left enraged and threatening revenge on Thursday when a majority did the only logical thing and stripped away their power to block the president’s nominees."

"In a 52-to-48 vote that substantially altered the balance of power in Washington, the Senate changed its most infuriating rule and effectively ended the filibuster on executive and judicial appointments."

"From now on, if any senator tries to filibuster a presidential nominee, that filibuster can be stopped with a simple majority, not the 60-vote requirement of the past. That means a return to the democratic process of giving nominees an up-or-down vote, allowing them to be either confirmed or rejected by a simple majority."

"Republicans warned that the rule change could haunt the Democrats if they lose the White House and the Senate. But the Constitution gives presidents the right to nominate top officials in their administration and name judges, and says nothing about the ability of a Senate minority to stop them. (The practice barely existed before the 1970s.)"